Milestones

[liv]

One of the earliest posts I wrote when I joined LJ in 2003 was an account of hatam_soferet's wedding. And it seems like it's one of the things I do with this journal, I write about weddings in my social circle. There's been a good number this past decade, which is perhaps not surprising as I was 24 at the start of it, that's the most popular time of life for weddings.

Anyway on Saturday I was present at the wedding of ewt and hairyears. hairyears mentioned to me and jack that attending our wedding was part of what convinced him that a wedding can be personal and meaningful to the couple and doesn't have to be awful. And this wedding most certainly was personalized.

It was a church wedding, which did all the things well that Anglican weddings do, a beautiful old stone building, resonant words, and music from the best of the English sacred musical tradition. As a church wedding, it was informed throughout by ewt's deep Christian commitment and faith. For one thing this is the stuff she actually believes in, it wasn't just a nice olde worlde ritual, and for another, the church is actually her local community church that she attends regularly and is deeply involved in the community, so the complete opposite of just a charming backdrop for the photos. The ceremonial duties were shared by the priest whose church it is and a different priest who is a very close friend of the bride's. At the same time, everything about the ritual was carefully and tactfully presented in a way that included her atheist groom. A wedding where only one half of the couple is religious can leave the other as just an afterthought, but this was as inclusive as possible without watering down the Christian elements. A minor benefit of this carefully constructed liturgy was that I, as a Jewish guest, felt far more comfortable than I usually do at Christian weddings.

Also, ewt is a professional musician and it really showed. One of the amazing things about English churches is that you often find amateur choirs with no formal musical training making beautiful music with complex harmonies. And this church had one of those, yes, but it was augmented by ewt's own more specialist choir, and much of the music was in the West Gallery style they are expert in. Also some music played by ewt's parents and an organ piece by our own wonderful deborah_c; I felt strangely proud to share a musician with a wedding that set such very high musical standards. There was an anthem composed specially for the wedding with some text from the Song of Songs, which was sublime.

The invitation had specified waistcoats, and waistcoats, well. I don't wear them, habitually, but I've been thinking for a while that I would probably look good in them. And when I mentioned that I was thinking of acquiring some waistcoats for the wedding just about everybody who's ever fancied me commented with some variant of, mm, sexy! So I bought a bunch of waistcoats from eBay, mostly ex-hire stock from wedding companies. It turns out that the waistcoats sold for men are often much nicer and certainly much shinier than those sold for women. So I'm all like, I don't care about gender conventions, I'll get a male-coded waistcoat all shiny and purple and dapper. But in practice it turns out I don't have the physical body to really get away with a waistcoat cut for the shape that clothes marketers assume men to have.

So I had a crisis of gender expression at IRC and they helped me to put together an outfit based on the one waistcoat I'd bought that fits over breasts and hips. Which is a lovely garment but not at all the kind of thing I normally wear, so it doesn't match most of my other clothes. So all the helpful #dreamwidth people sorted me out with a ruffled shirt, a blue-grey skirt, and a hat which made me feel like I was covering my head for shabbat without being in your face JEWISH at a church wedding, and which picks up some of the colours of the waistcoat. And designed me a hairstyle which looked formal but is within my capability to achieve on my own, and kaberett very brilliantly pointed out that the perfect finishing touch would be my Lioness pendant, which is grey-green labradorite with secret hidden purple. So I think that worked, that's a sartorial direction that would bear further experiments, slightly more masculine than I usually go for without looking like drag.

I was in fact slightly disappointed to find how few other people had paid attention to the dress suggestion (to be fair, it wasn't actually a dress code). I think I was the only woman at the wedding wearing a waistcoat and there weren't even that many waistcoated men. But at least jack had the excuse to wear the waistcoat from his wedding outfit, so that was pleasing.

Also, never mind what they were wearing, the wedding was a great opportunity to see lots and lots of people I like, as weddings are. The Enleytonment people, of course, including khalinche whom I hadn't seen in way too long. But also ewt knows loads of other people I like from other social circles, some fandom people and some Cambridge people and the karen2205, whom it was a particularly pleasant surprise to see. And alextiefling and nanaya were there and I finally got to meet their excellent offspring TestSubjectM. So after the very lovely service there was a delightful afternoon of eating lots and lots of food and chatting to a whole bunch of fun and interesting people, so that was about the perfect occasion.

One thing about this wedding is that ewt needs to be married in order to pursue her chosen career (which I find a bit horrifying, honestly, I'm not convinced that employers should get that level of say in people's personal lives), whereas hairyears held strong views against marriage and particularly religious marriage. So for a long time it had seemed like their otherwise wonderful relationship was stuck in an unfixable impasse. I am full of admiration for hairyears for being willing to compromise on this really big deal thing. That's a huge sacrifice to make, even for someone you love very much. I do hope that being married will continue to make the two of them as happy as they visibly were on Saturday!

As it happens, atreic and emperor were also celebrating a life transition on Saturday: they were holding a housewarming party for a house that they have actually bought. So we went straight from the wedding to help them celebrate this momentous occasion. They have acquired a most excellent house, which was duly admired, and they have a really excellent crowd of friends who showed up to help them celebrate this. I think I am maybe getting too old for this continuous twelve-hour long party thing (that's a bit of an exaggeration as there was a break in the middle while jack drove up the M11 from the wedding to the housewarming). But by the time it got to 2 am I was attempting to have a big philosophical debate about machine learning with ptc24 and mister_jack and fanf at a point in the evening where none of us were really forming coherent sentences.

On Sunday I woke up some time in the afternoon, and groggily reached towards jack. By the time I'd completed the slow thought process of, oh, he's not there... I suppose he must have got up already then... jack had reappeared in the doorway with a big cup of hot, delicious tea. Being guests at someone else's wedding had already reminded me how much I like my husband and how glad I am we got married, but bringing me tea like that was a whole other level of romantic.

Comments

[emperor]

I appreciate you may not be able to say, but what kind of job /requires/ you to be married???

[liv]

I'll answer you in PM because I'm not sure quite how public ewt's career plans are just yet.

[liv]

And congrats again on the house, by the way!

[lethargic_man]

What I was going to say before I saw you'd already said it.

[crystalpyramid]

I'm curious about this as well. But I'm assuming it's something a bit stronger than "she plans to have children and her career requires her to be married before she can respectably do that", which is more of my own situation.

[naath]

I'd guess "requires marriage" means "rather than 'shacking up'" not "rather than single" which would be very odd...

But still, I find it odd to contemplate a situation where my employer would say things like "your life outside of work is insufficiently conventional, stop it". None of their beeswax! Besides "shacking up" and "having children without bothering to get married" are really quite usual things these days.

[crystalpyramid]

It's interesting — I get the impression from my DW friendslist that this is much more socially acceptable in the UK than the US. Of course, I'm a high school teacher in a Catholic school...

[liv]

Yup, rather than shacking up is the salient point. I do find it really odd that any employer has that much of a say over people's private life, but then again... there are lots of jobs that need a CRB and it's potentially much harder to get one if your love life is very unconventional. But I do agree that these days living with someone you're not married to barely counts as unconventional!

[liv]

I'm surprised abour your situation too, actually; is it legal where you are for an employer to discriminate against people who have kids out of wedlock? But naath is right, it's not that ewt has to be married so much as that she isn't allowed to be in a relationship with someone she isn't married to. So breaking up with hairyears to pursue her career would've been an option, but obviously that would be a much sadder outcome than the lovely wedding which is what actually happened.

[crystalpyramid]

Sure it's legal - it says in my contract that I can be dismissed for not upholding the school's values. Also possibly without cause — schools like to reserve the right to make messy situations go away without having a battle. It was useful a couple years ago when a colleague got dismissed for inappropriate behavior towards a student.

And people who have relationships that aren't formalized in marriage aren't exactly a protected minority in the US. Is it different in the UK?

My school is kind — I might not lose my job. But the narrative of having a kid out of wedlock while teaching at a Catholic school... is not a narrative I want to have to deal with, any more than the school would want to have to deal with it. It would be incredibly socially awkward.

[liv]

I'm not well up on equalities law here, but I know I've been told very emphatically by HR lots of times that if I'm involved in a hiring or promotion decision I must not ask any questions that even implicitly touch on someone's marital status, so I've been assuming it's protected in some way. I think in general in the UK there's fairly little stigma against unmarried parents.

I think that teachers are a tricky case, because there is that whole thing of upholding the ethos and values of the school, as well as the fact of working with minors in general. I know there have been stories of teachers getting in trouble for behaviour in their private lives that isn't considered appropriate for the role, things like drunk pics showing up on FB. I definitely see what you mean about a socially awkward narrative rather than directly losing your job for that reason, though.

[crystalpyramid]

Interesting. I've definitely heard about people having to carefully not ask prying questions about e.g. sexual orientation in interviews here, but I think that's usually due to institution-level nondiscrimination policies or city/state law, not federal. And while I think they're maybe not supposed to ask about marital status too (for the same reasons), I know it does happen — I hear complaints about this in the other direction from women being discriminated against in the academic job market for having something going on besides careers. Mostly in the past, or at least, more egregiously in the past, but it still happens.

I also know that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (who I don't work for) explicitly asked in their application paperwork if I was "married in the eyes of the church", which seems like the kind of thing a law would prohibit, if there was a law. Not being married at all, I figured I was okay — I think they prefer singles shacking up to divorcees. Or at least, that's the implication of the question.

The other piece that makes me think there's a difference is that I really only know one person in my social circle who's had a kid out of wedlock. And it was a big deal for her — she dropped out of law school and life was a huge struggle. (Some mental health issues didn't help.) All of my real peers who are having kids are getting married first. My former roommate's little sister is pregnant, but I get the impression that the family is freaking out substantially. The first person I encountered who spoke casually about having a kid with an unmarried partner was an expatriate on DW living in the UK.

So yeah... this side of the pond, more religiously uptight since 1776? Or something.

[liv]

Thank you, this is a really interesting insight into how stuff works over there. I really like that about DW, just getting to know the little details about how things work in other cultures! I always forget just how much legislation happens at the state rather than the federal level, especially for "big" things like marriage and anti-discrimination.

I think our anti-discrimination laws have been beefed up recently, and the statistics do clearly show that discrimination against mothers still goes on in spite of these precautions. And poking about documents giving guidance to employers on how to implement anti-discrimination laws, it does seem like there can be exceptions for both religious organizations and schools, which I hadn't really been aware of before. Not to the extent that these orgs can just do whatever they like, but the standards of equality they have to meet are somewhat relaxed.

Really interesting observation that nearly everyone you know gets married before having kids. Here it's a lot more of a mix, though we're more uptight here than in Sweden where the most popular time to get married is when the couple's first kid is old enough to be a cute bridesmaid / pageboy! Though over there they have very strong rights for common-law couples (called by the rather unfortunate to US ears name sambo), so it doesn't make a lot of difference legally and financially whether parents marry or not.

I'm also fascinated that the Archdiocese prefers shacking up to remarriage after divorce; obviously that's in line with Catholic theology, but I get the impression that here, they've kind of given up raising serious objections to remarriage because being strict on that was just alienating too much of the congregation. I wonder whether a Catholic school here would be allowed to refuse to employ a remarried divorce(e).

Derailing the subject to sartorial finery (my own, how egotistical!)

[lethargic_man]

But in practice it turns out I don't have the physical body to really get away with a waistcoat cut for the shape that clothes marketers assume men to have.

Hah; I could have told you that. I remember many years ago Assael the then Masorti shaliach turned up to the Marom ball wearing what screamed out to me was a women's waistcoat. I have no idea whether he or anyone else there was aware of this, but I certainly noticed it.

Incidentally, it's just struck me that you won't be aware that I realised a few years ago that the formal gold, black and white waistcoat you got me for my birthday a decade ago, which until then I had only worn on the rare occasions I'm wearing a DJ, would also do nicely for a Yom Kippur variant on my normal Shabbos waistcoat-and-bowtie attire, so I've been wearing it on YK ever since. (I also this last year spotted a white bowtie in a charity shop, and wore that this year as more YK-appropriate than a black one.)

[liv]

Well, I was kind of talking about my outfit a lot too; indeed I've described what I wore in detail and not mentioned what the bride wore at all, so I can hardly call you egotistical. I am really chuffed to hear you've been wearing the waistcoat I gave you for YK. And you're absolutely right that a white bowtie is the thing to go with that outfit and that occasion.

[karen2205]

Lovely to see you too:) though not sure why my presence would have been a surprise. I was responsible for ewt and hairyears meeting in the first place!

[liv]

Oops, sorry! I can't remember how I know ewt at this juncture, let alone how you know her. Was it one of doseybat's parties where you introduced the couple?

You did a really good thing getting them together, anyway. They're such a lovely couple. There's a Jewish legend that if you matchmake two couples who are meant to be together you guarantee your place in heaven :-)

[rysmiel]

Anyway on Saturday I was present at the wedding of [personal profile] ewt and [personal profile] hairyears. [personal profile] hairyears mentioned to me and [personal profile] jack that attending our wedding was part of what convinced him that a wedding can be personal and meaningful to the couple and doesn't have to be awful.

Yay being a transitive good influence. *hug*

[liv]

Definitely yay for that! Thank you for the inspiration.

[sunflowerinrain]

Happy sigh :)

[liv]

It was a really nice weekend, all round.